STRIDE Final

Jared Joseph

August 16, 2018

Question

     How did issues surrounding the USA PATRIOT Act arise in public discouse, and how did these issues change over time?




  This piece of legislation influenced several aspects of federal policy, and massively changed how government surveillance operates in the United States, yet the 131 page piece of legislation was introduced and passed into law in only 4 days. How was it discussed during that time, and how did people talk about it after?

Process

Red = Code, Green = File, Yellow = Decision, Blue = Visualization

PATRIOT Act in the Media

Main events chosen qualitativly through reading news entries surrounding each peak.

Exploration of Events

Ran topic models surrounding each peak in a 3 month window.

The following examples have been picked for interest, and need significant refinment!

October 2001 - USA PATRIOT Act Passed

Examples Topics 6 & 11

December 2005 - USA PATRIOT Act Re-Authorized

Example Topics 1 & 15

May 2015 - USA PATRIOT Act Largly Expires

Example Topics 4 & 9

Progress in STRIDE

  1. Started With Only an Idea
  2. Learned to Scrape Pages Embedded with JavaScript
  3. Collected Data
  4. Visualized
  5. Started Topic Models

Extensions

  1. Further clean text, think I have some non-English papers included
  2. Better refine topic model parameters
  3. Get foreign newspapers
  4. Further research mention spikes